The inaugural TED conference in 1984 featured one of the first demonstrations of the Macintosh Computer and the Sony compact disc. Over the last two decades TED has continued to bring us great new ideas and mind boggling technologies. 2011 is no different. Below we feature a hand picked selection of some of the most awesome tech to have emerged out of TED in Monteray California and TEDGlobal in Edinburgh ScotlandMarkus Fischer: A robot that flies like a birdIcarus' ...

The internet has allowed a school to sprout in a remote area of the Amazon where teachers tend not to linger due to harsh living conditions and a scarcity of students.Teachers in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, conduct lessons streamed to students in the village of Tumbira using an internet connection made possible with a generator-powered radio signal.If not for "distance learning", children from far-flung Amazon river communities would forgo school or endure arduous boat trips ...

Skype has announced that it plans buy mobile messaging startup GroupMe, for an undisclosed sum of money.GroupMe is a mobile messaging platform which utilises a wireless connection for group instant chat on Blackberry, iPhone and Android platforms. One of the most prominent features of GroupMe's product is that it can switch to text-based services if there is no usable data connection.The deal, when combined with the purchase of mobile video provider Qik, is set to augment Skype's role ...

Honk Kong police have arrested a 29-year old man following a cyber attack on the city’s stock exchange website. The attack, the second in two days, halted the trading of shares in seven different companies.According to spokesperson for the police, five personal computers and two mobile phones were among the items seized when the man was arrested."He is being investigated under the offence of access to a computer with criminal or dishonest intent," the spokesman said, adding ...

Facebook users in a northeastern German state have been told to stay away from the "Like" button (Gefällt mir in German) on Facebook. Government sites within Schleswig-Holstein have been asked by the Independent Centre for Privacy Protection to remove all Facebook plug-ins or risk a possible fine of EU€50 000.In an official press release, the centre stated that the Facebook fan pages and the "Like" button have been shown to infringe upon laws pertaining to European data privacy.The ...

Two women washed clothes in the dark water of the Rio Negro as a boat glided past with a camera-laden Google tricycle strapped to the roof, destined to give the world a window into the Amazon rain forest.A “trike” typically used to capture street scenes for Google’s free online mapping service launched Thursday from the village of Tumbira in a first-ever project to let Internet users virtually explore the world’s largest river, its wildlife and its communities.Read more on Gearburn.com

Apple plans to begin trial production of a next generation iPad in October with an eye to an early 2012 launch, The Wall Street Journal reported.The newspaper, citing "people familiar with the situation," said Apple is working with component suppliers and its assembler in Asia on the iPad 3 and has ordered key components such as display panels and chips.It said the next generation iPad is expected to feature a high resolution 2048-by-1536 pixel display compared with the 1024-by-768 display ...

If you take the time to read some of the many articles on mobile app strategy, you'll find that they focus on trying to answer the crux argument of whether to build a native app for each mobile platform or a web app that tries to cover them all. After all, there are significant costs involved, both in development and time to market, and focussing on one strategy appears wiser than trying to be the best in all.In most ...

How many social networks have you heard of outside of Facebook, Twitter and Google+?Turning our lives into single-line updates is now the acceptable social drug which the big three continue to push into our digital veins.Not every social network, however, has been as successful as the big players and, like sand through an hourglass, these are the defunct social networks of our lives.BahuThis site began in 2007 as a social portal for French and Belgium students but ...

If you're a search newbie and want to quickly learn the ropes of the Pay Per Click (PPC) world then using Google Adwords and a tracking program like Analytics will be quite useful. These tools, coupled with a little Excel spreadsheet savvy, can go a long way in managing a new campaign.Here are a few strategies to keep in mind when launching a brand new PPC campaign:1. Start with Google: Your friends may weave a yarn about Yahoo!/Bing ads but ...